Profiles, Etc.

These are some of the people I've profiled over the years. They include a former grand wizard of the KKK, a pedophile after prison, an aging hobo, a scientist bent on curing pets' boredom, and a chain-smoking microbiologist who created the world's most deadly strain of anthrax.

Teresa O'Leary never recovered from the murder of her family -- until the day she decided to die.

By David Abel | The Boston Globe Magazine | 7/18/2004The pain had mostly worn off when the phone rang. More than a week had passed since the canister of popcorn burst all over her family's kitchen, prompting her father to beat her with a broomstick and state officials to take her to the sanctuary of the old Boston City Hospital, a few miles from her home in Dorchester's Fields Corner.

At 15, the big girl with the mousy brown hair regaled children at the hospital with harrowing stories. She told them how her father, a Purple Heart-winning Korean War veteran, would carry around an old .38-caliber revolver, sometimes brandishing it in front of her eighth-grade teachers. She described how he used chains to lock her and her younger brothers and sisters inside the basement, threatening to kill them if they didn't behave.

When she answered the phone at the hospital on that summer day 30 years ago, the voice on the other end sounded stern but at the same time strangely groggy. "I want you to have your mother's clothes and jewelry," her father told her. "I want Arthur [his brother] to have all my tools."

Then the line went dead.

Around noon the next day, June 10, 1973, as a heat wave roasted Boston, Teresa Margaret O'Leary pushed through the unlocked front door of her small two-story home and found her entire family dead. Bullet holes in their heads, her mother and five siblings lay in pools of blood, victims of her father, who was slumped over a bureau next to his bed, the phone still in his hand, dead from a cocktail of sleeping pills, rum, whiskey, and brandy.

This is the story of a child's worst nightmare coming true, about a girl who lost everything, was abandoned by her relatives, robbed of her sanity, and sentenced to a life in mental hospitals. It's a rare glimpse inside the halls of the mental health system and of one notoriously challenging patient, who resisted treatment, escaped confinement, and often required restraint in straitjackets. But it's also the story of a survivor who, after decades behind locked doors, found freedom, about the light that penetrated the darkness of one of the city's most gruesome murder-suicides.

Last summer, after years of penury, solitude, and transferring from one institution to another, where doctors treated her for a host of disorders that seemed to lock her in her adolescence, Teresa made a fateful choice, perhaps the first independent decision of her life. And it brought her a peace she had never imagined.

IN THE CLOSE-KNIT neighborhood of Fields Corner, the large Irish family struggled, and their neighbors knew it.

The children, mostly well behaved, played marbles on the sidewalk, rode their bikes, and hung around Lucky Strike Lanes, the bowling alley a few blocks away from the home their parents rented on Clayton Street. A good day for Teresa, at 15 the oldest, and the others - George Jr., 13, Colleen, 11, Kathleen, 10, and the twins, Michael and Melinda, 8 -- was when they could scrape up enough change for pizza.George O'Leary had been stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, when he met Thelma Turner near her home in nearby Woodbridge. George had grown up in Fields Corner with a father who beat him and neighborhood kids who taunted him. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and enlisted in the Army in 1948, but after a month in training, the 6- foot-3-inch, 200-pound recruit washed out. He eventually reenlisted and served in the infantry in Korea, suffering a wound that sliced through his back and stomach. His battlefield actions won him several medals, including the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

After returning home, he twice failed the exam to become a Boston police officer and settled for work as a security guard. To relieve his stress and the pain of ulcers from his war wounds, he often sat in a kiddie pool in the family's backyard and played with his revolver. Other times, he would hold the gun to his head and pretend to pull the trigger.

THE FIRST SIGN of Teresa's troubles came in 1971, when officials at her school saw the 13-year-old's bruises. At first, George refused to seek help. When a social worker offered to come over, George threatened to blow his head off if he approached their house. Two years later, psychologists diagnosed him with "personality disintegration."

His wife, Thelma, ultimately prevailed on him to give therapy a try, but he lost interest quickly and stopped going. Thelma and Teresa continued, however, regularly meeting with Jean Flynn, a social worker. She would hear stories about how George beat Teresa with straps, chains, and brooms, and about how Teresa rebelled, often tearing up the house, refusing food, or defecating in her parents' room. Thelma started drinking and once threw a vase at George, who responded by beating her. The cycle of violence kept repeating itself, and Flynn observed: "Teresa desperately wants her father's attention to her, to love her, even if in the negative way of beatings."

In March 1973, six months after school officials asked the state to act, social workers removed Teresa from the home, sending her to Boston City Hospital for her own protection. Three months later, with George out of control, Thelma threatened to leave, too, sending her 43-year-old husband into a tirade.

For three hours on Friday, June 8, with Teresa at the hospital, George held the rest of his family at gunpoint, blaming his wife for not disciplining their six kids, complaining that he lost his last job because he had to watch them. That afternoon, Thelma filed assault and battery charges against George, but the court postponed the case for a month.

Later that day, around midnight, as his 36-year-old wife and the five children slept in their cramped bedrooms, George put a pillow over each of their heads and, one by one, slipped his gun beneath it to muffle the sound. Then he pulled the trigger.

Before killing himself the next night with the lethal brew, around the same time he called Teresa at the hospital, George scribbled a note on legal stationery: "I love my wife. I love my children. I can't live without them. So I'm going to take them with me. . . . I'm sorry I had to do it."

AFTER THE FUNERAL at St. Ambrose Church in Fields Corner, which hundreds of people from all over Boston attended, Teresa's school guidance counselor took her to McLean Hospital in Belmont. She had wanted to stay with relatives, particularly her Uncle Claude Turner, her mother's twin brother, who lived in Lowell. For a time, he and his wife welcomed Teresa for weekend visits. But eventually they stopped calling and said they couldn't visit because of car trouble. Teresa never heard from them again.

The hospital staff wouldn't release Teresa to other relatives, whom they judged to be interested in the money raised for her after the murders or who might abuse her further.

Teresa had nowhere else to go.

Diagnosed with "acute grief reaction," she gained weight and received a steady supply of drugs, struggling to adjust to her sudden solitude. She resumed her schoolwork at McLean, attended group therapy and met with numerous psychologists, played tennis and softball, went tobogganing and ice skating, and ultimately opened up about the murders. "I wish my father was alive," she told one psychologist, "so he could go to the electric chair." But her improvement proved fleeting, and it wasn't long before she was ignoring her curfew, smearing makeup on her face, stealing patients' cigarettes and cash, and even setting fires. The staff introduced her to restraints such as straitjackets and the dreaded quiet room, a bolted, padded cell. Over the next two years, while ballooning from 120 to nearly 300 pounds, Teresa would be described by her psychologists as "paranoid with masochistic" tendencies. Teresa's nurses saw her as uncontrollable and sent her to a state mental hospital, which they knew was her worst fear.

AT 17, TERESA packed her few possessions and left for Boston State Hospital, a century-old mental institution, where she found herself in a large ward with the most hard-core patients.

The hospital's psychiatrists put Teresa on powerful antipsychotic drugs as well as lithium, prescribed to control manic depression, but it didn't stop her from rebelling. She refused to participate in activities and failed to comply with treatment plans. Teresa spent her time smoking cigarettes, teasing other patients, and sometimes feigning suicide by tying a sheet around her neck.

She enrolled in and soon dropped out of the hospital's school, completing the equivalent of the 11th grade. She spent her days enticing male patients into the tunnels below the hospital, to trade sex for cigarettes. Nearly 6 feet tall, heavy, and loud, Teresa could only be restrained by a team of nurses. "Teresa was the worst around the time of her family's death," according to Ruth Beshong, a former nurse who helped care for Teresa. "The only thing she ever wanted was a family and to be in place where she was wanted."

Then Teresa began escaping.

IN 1981, BOSTON State Hospital closed, and Teresa, now 23, had to move. Again. This time to a large brick building a few miles away in Jamaica Plain, at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. Soon after, doctors discharged her to a halfway house. A week later, Teresa nearly died overdosing on codeine, and she returned to the Shattuck. "Why can't I die and get it all over with?" she wrote in a note to nurses. "I have nothing to live for. . . . Why can't I be shot in the head, just like my mother?"

But when it seemed she had hit bottom, her mood lifted. She was loving and euphoric. She chatted up nurses about their families and dreamed aloud of a husband and a home with a white picket fence. She would dance the jitterbug in the hallway with nurses and crack wise about them later, sometimes leaving fellow patients and staff laughing hysterically. Less than a year later, her highs lasting longer - she briefly quit smoking and lost weight - she impressed doctors so much that they allowed her to live with another patient's family. Four days after she moved, however, the family kicked her out, and Teresa began living on the streets.

Only a few days had passed when she met two young men outside a bar in South Boston. It was late, and she followed them to a nearby swimming pool, where others met them and, according to what Teresa would later tell doctors, threatened to kill her. They beat her with bricks and stones, forced her to have sex with each of them, and left her bruised and slipping in and out of consciousness. The next morning, officers found Teresa and returned her to the Shattuck. She continued her pattern of threatening to hang herself one moment and smiling beatifically the next.

One nurse attributed Teresa's problems to the fact that "staff cannot give her the love of a boyfriend, mother, father or sibling, and . . . nobody could ever fill her. She is so empty."

FREEDOM BECKONED FROM beyond the hospital's locked doors, and in 1988, at age 29, Teresa took another stab at living more independently. But after two years in a group home, she could no longer ward off depression. Teresa began hearing her father's voice, telling her to join her family. When a fire alarm sounded in the home, she refused to leave. "I might as well die in the fire," she said. "I should never have been born."

Back at the Shattuck, where psychiatrists diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and schizoaffective disorder, Teresa insisted she had "no life."

It was a spring day in 1992 when an assertive woman named Betty Dew introduced herself to Teresa, telling her she was her new legal guardian. Teresa looked at the stranger, a former nurse with a law degree, and brushed her off with a simple "Get lost."

Teresa had trouble extending trust to anyone, let alone another caretaker who she feared would leave her, as so many others had. But Dew wouldn't leave, and it took months before Teresa offered her anything more than "The doctor is a nut." Still, it would be the one relationship that would last for the rest of her life.

In 1994, with Dew's prodding, Teresa made another go at living outside the hospital. In a new group home, she bowled, swam, and visited a nearby petting zoo. Though she stole and crashed the director's car, she received praise from her caretakers as a "big help." Teresa's "getting the idea she deserves a life despite the death of her family," one therapist wrote.

But as her spirit seemed to heal, her body began to fail. Lethargic and bloated at 37, Teresa was diagnosed with kidney failure, most likely the result of nearly a decade of lithium treatment. The group home sent her back to the Shattuck. It would be the beginning of a litany of ailments and injuries -- from respiratory failure to pneumonia to a massive hematoma on her left hip. She also suffered from many operations gone wrong, including so many infected catheters that her body became like a ragged pincushion.

To survive her kidney woes, Teresa had to sit in a chair three days a week, four hours at a time, after nurses connected dialysis tubes to her veins and arteries. That was the easy part. Not only did she undergo repeated operations, in which doctors inserted catheters everywhere from her groin to her chest, she had to maintain strict control over her weight. That meant the amount of water she drank had to be strictly regulated - every day, for the rest of her life.

Yet she couldn't control herself, and she sneaked water, sometimes slurping it from toilet bowls. "I can cheat sometimes. So what?" she told one doctor. "I don't care if I die."

Even in her misery, though, she finally had what she'd always yearned for -- a family. The doting caretakers, the patients she considered her pals or even boyfriends, and Betty Dew. They took her out for Chinese food, on trips to her family's unmarked pauper's grave site, and she made them colorful beaded bracelets and necklaces.

And then, in June 2003, on the same day that she became an orphan 30 years earlier, one more operation to replace one more catheter went wrong.

Around midnight, her face gaunt, her voice raspy, and the aches and pains consuming her, Teresa kept screaming. "You're torturing me," she yelled at the Shattuck intern trying to stop the blood flowing from her chest. A shell of her normal self, Teresa was half the weight of a few years before, her skin sagging off her bones, many of her veins scarred. She looked 45 going on 75. The next morning, after an ambulance took Teresa to the Tufts-New England Medical Center, Dew found her in a hospital gown, crying, her blood-soaked clothes piled in a bag.

Months before, Teresa's doctors had wondered how far to push their treatment. "Remember, we were talking about what to do if your heart stopped, if you would want to have a breathing tube?" Dew asked Teresa.

"No, no, no!" Teresa shouted. "It's time. I can't do it anymore."

All of her life, others had decided when she could smoke, what she could eat, whom she could speak to. This was her decision. Without dialysis, Teresa's kidneys couldn't filter toxins from her blood, and it wouldn't take long for the poison to take effect. She understood.

"Can't you just put me to sleep, like a dog?"

Dew looked at her incredulously. "No, that's not legal."

Teresa turned the subject to her funeral. She wanted to be buried with a real rosary -- "not those fake plastic ones"; she wanted an open casket, because her relatives wouldn't let her view her family at their funeral; and she wanted her stuffed animals, her favorite cigarettes, Basic 100s, and a Pepsi buried with her.

Then Teresa lit a cigarette bummed from a stranger, and Dew watched as all the years of pent-up anger, all the strain from the years of pain and loneliness, and all the demands of Teresa's relentless routine seemed to slip away. A calm came over her. And then, exultant, Teresa broke into song: "You're a grand old flag,/ You're a high-flying flag,/ And forever in peace may you wave." Afterward, she recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Dew never saw her so happy.

IF TERESA LIVED her life like a ghost to the outside world, she was something of a celebrity inside the corridors of the mental health system, with her contagious smile that revealed all the missing teeth from years of poor hygiene. In droves, doctors, nurses, everyone from guards to administrators, flocked to see her on 6 South, a medical unit she often called home at the Shattuck, to hug her and offer her presents. They took her to the beach and out for ice cream. She was like a queen, her wheelchair her throne. "I never had so much fun in my life," she told her guardian. "I do love a lot of people."

Some of the staff questioned whether she was competent to choose to stop dialysis and cried when they learned of her decision. "We just didn't want her to die," says Mary Keohane, Teresa's chief dialysis nurse. "It was like, 'I worked so hard to keep you here. How dare you not continue!' "

AT 2 A.M. ON ONE of her last days, Teresa refused to sleep. "Freedom -- that's what I want," she told Dew, promising to be her guardian angel. "I know you don't fly like a bird . . . the way they soar, like the crows and the . . . little pigeons. Freedom's in your heart. It's beautiful - peace at last."

Dew sneaked her out of the hospital and took her to the large home of one of Teresa's long-term caregivers, where she breathed in a quiet she had never known. "My dream has come true," she said. "This is all I ever wanted."

Her gravelly voice became halting, her nose runny, her eyes heavy, and her skin increasingly pale. She was dying, but still smiling, almost glowing.

Asked to sum up her life in a video her caretakers made, Teresa said, "I was a hell-raiser."

Two days later, on a perfect spring afternoon, Teresa sat on the stoop of a local hospice center. A doctor and social worker held her hands and rubbed lilac lotion on her back, listening to Teresa crack jokes to the end. She held a Pepsi in one hand and a Basic 100 in the other. Next to her were the stuffed animals that reminded her of the family's German shepherds, which her father had also shot to death the night he murdered her family.

"I'm ready to die," she said in her last moments.

AT THE SHATTUCK, administrators cleared the chapel for the funeral, and hundreds of people -- janitors, fellow patients, the chief executive - came to celebrate Teresa's life. They kissed her hands, her forehead, her cheeks. Some left a Pepsi or cigarette in the casket. Others brought lilacs, her favorite flowers, or beaded necklaces. She looked peaceful in the lilac-colored casket, her head on a lacy pillow, just as she'd demanded.

Nearly everyone had a story. A nurse joked about how Teresa flirted with the paramedics who took her to the hospice center. A patient welled up with tears and described her as his best friend. A therapist recounted how she hid a pet mouse in her shoe. They read poems, sang songs, and lavished their "Big T," as Teresa called herself, with praise.

At the end, one caretaker said this about Teresa: "She has lived a life warriors would dread. . . . She brazenly turned hard times into fun-filled times. Even at departure time, she still beamed smiles to all. She played with words to crack beautiful, rib-cracking jokes. She knew life must be lived to the fullest. She survived when others succumbed to the pains of life."

SIDEBAR: In Her Own WordsTeresa O'Leary provided a grim picture of her world inside psychiatric hospitals with this piece from a 1987 writers' group that she had joined.

"LIFE IN THE NUT HOUSE"

Life in the nut house. They tell you what to do and I don't like to be bossed around. I don't like the way they give you meds all the time. They think they can take away your cig breaks from you. It is no fun being locked in the ward with a bunch of crazy people. I don't like the way nurses are always bossing me around. I just don't like the way they all boss you around.

It is like being in prison. I been here for 13 years. This place is nothing but trouble. The staff are mean to you. They think they are big shots around the ward. The people here are very sick and take a lot of meds. They pace up and down and also walk around. They are very mixed up and crazy in the head.

Thank God I have a radio which passes the time away. Some staff try their best. First the men shower then the women. We have snacks around 8:30 at night. We also have social hour which runs from 7 to 8 -- a whole hour. The staff go on break for one whole hour too.

I have been here a long time. Once you get in here it's hard to get out. There is only one staff I like the most. They tell me what to do and then we fight and I go use the quiet room. They are very mean to you. They don't treat you good. All the staff give me a hard time on the ward.I was 15 years old when I came in the hospital. I found my family dead and then they put me in the hospital. I thought I would have to stay here a long time.For more, listen to a broadcast that followed the publication of this story on National Public Radio's The Connection: theconnection.org/shows/2004/07/20040720_a_main.asp

AN AIDE ONCE complained to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that "one man in a thousand" understood his opinions. "I write for that man," Holmes is said to have replied. By comparison, Judge Bruce M. Selya, according to a former clerk, writes for "one in a million."

In more than 1,000 decisions over nearly 25 years on the federal bench, the past 20 in Boston as one of six judges on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Selya has beguiled -- and at times baffled -- colleagues and litigants with obscure and occasionally less than judicious verbiage.

Over the summer, for example, he opened a decision in a libel suit against the Boston Phoenix by writing: "The oenologist's creed teaches that we should drink no wine before its time. Much the same principle applies to summary judgment; it is a deliciously helpful device if properly timed, but one that can leave a sour taste if brought to bear on an insufficiently fermented record."

The judge's mix of arcana and acidity -- what he might call a "salmagundi" of "hyperbolic rodomontade" -- has been compared with that of Holofernes, the pompous schoolmaster in Shakespeare's "Love's Labor's Lost" who spoke in Latinisms. And over the years it has raised questions about the proper balance of clarity and style in judicial opinion writing.

Despite the rigorous logic of his decisions, which are among the most cited of federal judges, some scholars and fellow jurists have used his opinions as examples of what to avoid in legal writing. "Sometimes Judge Selya crosses the line," says US District Judge Nancy Gertner, who has had her share of opinions overturned by Selya. "We're not gods on high. We need to be as clear as possible."

Selya acknowledges the criticism. "I do take some kidding," he says.

In recent years, he insists, he has avoided using puns, particularly of litigants' names. (In a 1987 opinion involving a company called Brad Foote Gear Works, Selya couldn't resist noting that Foote "does not toe the mark," his "stance sidesteps the established principle," and concluding that "the shoe, fitting, must be worn.")

This month, the 72-year-old Reagan-appointed Rhode Islander, whose failing eyesight now forces him to use a special magnifying machine to read, will assume senior status, meaning he'll give up his seat on the court and hear cases at his leisure. Yet he shows no signs of abandoning his approach to language.

"There are no such things as obscure words; there are just words that are temporarily abandoned. It's part of my responsibility to resuscitate them," Selya says. "I may be incurably lexiphanic -- but lexiphanicism for its own sake is not my style."

A graduate of Harvard Law School who spent 22 years in private practice, Selya says he often fell asleep to all the profession's "gray prose," and vowed to spice up his opinions when he became a judge. "One of the challenges I set for myself was to see if sound jurisprudence could be written in such a way that would be relatively interesting reading," he says at his chambers in Providence. "Instead of being written in all grays, you could write it in pastels, maybe even a little vermillion or puce."

Scholars of legal writing, however, accuse Selya of going too far, to the point that his opinions are too often impenetrable, or worse, self-absorbed -- preoccupied with peculiar words that serve Selya's sense of style but obscure his meaning. One clerk, for instance, remembered a decision that left lawyers asking, "Who won?"

"As a word lover, you have to appreciate a fellow word lover," says Bryan A. Garner, editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary. "On the other hand, it can be disappointing to see a writer using a fancy word for an everyday idea."

Garner and others argue that judges should make the law more accessible by avoiding jargon, long, clause-ridden sentences, and 50-cent words.

"The job of the appellate judge is to communicate the decision as clearly and efficiently as possible," says Joseph Kimble, editor in chief of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing. "Just as lawyers shouldn't waste a judge's time, judges shouldn't waste a lawyer's time."

Transparency doesn't mean opinions must lack finesse, says Kimble, pointing to Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Robert Jackson as examples of those who maintained a plainspoken elegance. He and others also cite Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of an opinion-writer who turns a clever phrase without leaving litigants bereft of his meaning.

In "The Lawyers Guide to Writing Well," New York Law School professor Jethro Lieberman argues most legal writing ranges from foggy to flabby. It only gets worse when lawyers and jurists overreach. "There's a place for literary flair, if it's good," Lieberman says. "Writing that comes across as too cute, cavalier, or demeaning is a disservice."

As challenging as it may be to grasp, Selya's writing is rarely dull. William Domnarski, the author of "In the Opinion of the Court," a history of federal court judicial opinions, says he's so drawn to the judge's writing that he reads his new opinions nearly every week.

"Selya does have a tendency to show off, but he takes you on a tour of the law with an impish style," Domnarski says. "He has his own voice, and he uses it to draw attention to what he believes. He should be applauded for that."

Selya's closest readers, however, are those who have no choice. In an arena where language is everything, misunderstanding can pose a serious problem.

When Selya's opinions return to Judge Reginald Lindsay on the federal district court of Massachusetts, he goes through the words very carefully.

"First, I have to understand it myself," Lindsay says. "You can't read his opinions on the subway...a pocket dictionary doesn't work."

Then he worries about improperly translating them to a jury. "I wonder whether I'm changing the meaning of his words. I worry if I choose a different word, am I changing the law?"

Fellow First Circuit judges say that while they may not always understand Selya's language, they have learned from him. Occasionally, Judge Juan Torruella even poaches from his opinions.

"Copying can be the biggest compliment you can pay someone," Torruella says. "One of his favorite words, 'struthious' [ostrichlike], I like very much. If people have to look it up, that's OK. It makes them think about his decisions."

For lawyers, meanwhile, arguing before Selya can be a harrowing experience.

John Tarantino, a criminal defense attorney in Providence, once received an opinion from the judge describing one of his arguments as having the "ubiquity and variety of graffiti in a subway."

"He pretty much killed me in the first graph," Tarantino says, noting the unpleasantness of showing such a decision to clients.

Dina Chaitowitz, a US attorney in Boston, says she used to fret about arguing before Selya. "I often feared that, given my own limited vocabulary, I might misunderstand and then incorrectly respond during oral argument to an exotically-worded question."

But for Selya, the more exotic, the better. In a book of memoirs his clerks gave him for his 15th year on the federal bench, Sara Lord recalls how the judge often flipped through his thick, dusty 1934 Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary to find the right word.

"It wasn't enough that the word be obscure," she writes, "it also had to be ancient and exotic in origin. Anglo-Saxon words were good, but I remember the judge being particularly excited when he was able to use an ancient Persian word that probably no living person had seen or heard in the last thousand years."

David Abel of the Globe staff can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.

Sidebar: In Selya's words:

Martha's Vineyard Scuba Headquarters, Inc. v. The Unidentified, Wrecked, & Abandoned Steam Vessel, 1987"When Erasmus mused that "[a] common shipwreck is a source of consolation to all", Adagia, IV.iii.9 (1508), he quite likely did not foresee inconcinnate free-for-alls among self-styled salvors. To the exact contrary of what the Dutch scholar had blithesomely predicted, the petitioner-appellant in this case, Martha's Vineyard Scuba Headquarters, Inc. (Mavis), took not a particle of comfort when an order was entered in a federal district court awarding title to various artifacts retrieved from a sunken ship to a rival, Marshallton, Inc. (Marshallton). Mavis appeals. We affirm."

William Williams v. Ashland Engineering Co., 1995“We are reminded today that malapropisms, despite their semantic shortcomings, often describe the human condition with unerring accuracy. There are, for example, certain situations that actually do evoke the sensation of "deja vu all over again." We explain below why this appeal falls into that category.”

Waddie Jusino v. Carmen Sonia Zayas, 1989“We today confront a procedural motley, consisting of a miswritten docket, a timeous motion thought late, a further motion (of uncertain provenance), a wrongly-captioned appeal, a long-delayed reconsideration and reversal of position by the district court (eventuating at a time when its jurisdiction, arguably, was in abeyance), a second appeal, and a compendium of interwoven details (including the remnants of a waived motion for directed verdict). Underneath the case lie, however, more comforting threads -- principles of equity and common sense. Their presence allows us to shape the dizzying patchwork of these appeals into a set of serviceable vestments.”

Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers Union, Local No. 59, v. Superline Transportation Company, 1992“It is said that coming events often cast their shadows before, cf., e.g., Cicero, De Divinatione, I, 118 ("It was ordained at the beginning of the world that certain signs should prefigure certain events."), and so it is in this appeal. A battle which started to go sour for the appellant two years ago ends today in full retreat …. A court need not, however, give credence to the movant's bald assertions, unsubstantiated conclusions, periphrastic circumlocutions, or hyperbolic rodomontade …. In the absence of any cognizable representation that its underlying suit possessed merit … we add, as an eschatocol of sorts, that not only the representation, but also the actuality, falls short.”

Vincent Ferrar v. USA, 2006“It is axiomatic that the government must turn square corners when it undertakes a criminal prosecution. This axiom applies regardless of whether the target of the prosecution is alleged to have engaged in the daintiest of white-collar crimes or the most heinous of underworld activities. It follows that courts must be scrupulous in holding the government to this high standard as to sympathetic and unsympathetic defendants alike. The case before us plays out against the backdrop of these aphorisms.”

Carroll Shelby v. Superformance International, Inc., 2006“The appellants, Carroll Shelby, Shelby American, Inc., and Carroll Shelby Licensing, Inc. (collectively, Shelby), cloak this appeal in the raiment of trade-dress law. That masquerade ignores the central question of mootness (an issue that Shelby attempted to obscure in its appellate filings). For the reasons that follow, we conclude that Shelby's appeal must be dismissed and that vacation of the decision below is unwarranted.”

Salim Aoude v. Mobil Oil Corporation, 1988“Plaintiff-appellant Salim Aoude, defendant-in-counterclaim, polemizes mightily against a preliminary injunction … In the end, Aoude huffs and puffs, but he fails to blow down the edifice which the district court competently constructed from the facts of record and the applicable law. Cf. The Three Little Pigs 16-18 … To the extent that appellant urges other grounds for reversal of the interlocutory injunction, they are either adequately covered by the district court's opinion, or so jejune as not to merit discussion, or both. In particular, the claim that the court below misused its discretion in declining to issue a restraining order in Aoude's favor trenches upon the frivolous. What appellant labors to portray as a robust haboob is not even a gentle zephyr. The house, we think, is sturdy enough to withstand the prevailing winds.”

Ronald E. Wagenmann v. Russell J. Adams, 1987“It was early in the seventeenth century when George Herbert wrote: "Marry your son when you will; your daughter when you can." The sagacity of that advice, suspect in any era, was called into grave doubt some three hundred fifty years later in Worcester, Massachusetts … Because the underlying circumstances border on the chimerical, we set out an exegetic account … We believe that the jury's view of Wagenmann as "a man more sinn'd against than sinning," to borrow a phrase which the bard of Avon used to describe another daughter-doubting paterfamilias, is fully supportable on this record.”

Norma Arriaga-Zayas v. International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union--Puerto Rico Council, 1987“In plaintiffs' judgment, Splendorform International, Inc. (Splendorform), a lingerie manufacturer, made a slip when it laid off some ninety sewing machine operators incident to a reorganization in 1984. …The relevant factual and procedural background has been set out authoritatively by the district court, and we need not restitch that fabric in any great detail … In this case, the plaintiffs' own filings place them snugly within the tightest of corsets … They claimed then to have lifted the petticoat of "pretensions" and to have glimpsed the perfidy which underlay it. Having spied the wrongdoing, the aggrieved workers were bound to act upon this knowledge in a timely fashion, that is, to sue within the six month limitations period or forever hold their peace. By neglecting to file a complaint for well over a year thereafter, they are undone.”

ByDavid Abel | Globe Staff | December 9, 2008As the 23-year-old wearing a T-shirt and jeans approached the bench, the judge dressed him down. "The next time you're here, if you could have a shirt with a collar - that would be more appropriate," he advised.

When a law student arguing for the district attorney's office described parts of Jackson Square as a "bad area," the judge shook his head, curling his lips in a dour scowl. "What does a `bad area' mean?" he demanded. "You can't generalize an entire community. I happen to live in that area."

Over his last 15 years on the bench at Roxbury District Court, where a day's docket often includes everyone from alleged shoplifters to murder defendants, Judge Edward R. Redd has honed a reputation for talking directly to defendants, issuing legalese-free decisions and a varying dose of avuncular or antagonistic admonishment.

Now in his third year as the court's presiding justice, the Republican appointee and lifelong Roxbury resident often passes judgment on his neighbors and has become something of a people's judge, which lawyers who have argued before him say reflects a modest evolution from a more law-and-order start.

"He gives people more breaks than he used to," especially when it comes to bail for those facing charges on top of more serious allegations, said Winston Kendall, a defense attorney and neighbor whom Redd recently scolded for requesting too many dates for a future hearing. "He was a lot tougher when he started, but he still has an edge. He doesn't mind cracking the whip."

Redd, who ties his long, graying dreadlocks in a thick ponytail, is one of only 41 minorities from Boston to the Berkshires serving on the bench, or about 10 percent of all state judges, according to the Supreme Judicial Court. He is one of nine minority judges, out of 29, in the Boston Municipal Court Department.

As a result, he often gets respect from those on the receiving end of his gavel, and his guff.

"It was scary going before him; there was a big sense of shame and guilt, because this man knew me and looked at me, and it was like, `Oh, my God,' you could see his disgust," said Jamarhl Crawford, 37, who grew up in Roxbury and appeared before Redd on several drug charges before joining the New Black Panther Party.

"I've seen him give a lot of my friends lectures, and he didn't cut any of us breaks. He was someone we looked up to, a positive black male role model in a community where fatherhood and black male role models are lacking."

Redd, who earns nearly $130,000 a year, can identify with many of the defendants who stand before him, and not just because they are neighbors and mainly minorities. The 60-year-old graduate of Boston College School of Law and former chairman of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission has had his own legal fights.

Shortly before being appointed by Governor William Weld in 1993, Redd was criticized for failing to disclose that the Boston Rent Equity Board had found that Redd, then a Roxbury landlord, had overcharged tenants, had lied to the board in an attempt to skirt rent control laws, and had locked a tenant out of his apartment in the winter.

Redd, who declined multiple requests to be interviewed, has also been accused of insensitivity and questionable judgment.

For years, prosecutors sought to overturn a decision Redd made to throw out criminal civil rights charges against a Boston man who allegedly spewed racial epithets at a meter enforcement officer in 1998, after the man paid her $5,000. Redd was criticized for pushing the settlement.

More recently, the state Judicial Conduct Commission launched an investigation into whether Redd helped delay a ruling on a potentially embarrassing lawsuit against then-state Senator Dianne Wilkerson. Before being appointed a judge, Redd had listed Wilkerson as one of five witnesses vouching for his qualifications. The commission last year cleared Redd of misconduct.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys say he treats defendants fairly, but with a distinct ken that comes from growing up and living in the community he serves.

"While I don't always agree with his rulings, I'm confident that he is always striving to be fair and impartial to all sides," said Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley. "He easily could have fled to the distant suburbs and dropped in by day to rule from the bench. Instead, he lives and works in Roxbury, so he understands - better than most, I think - that the vast majority of his neighbors are good-hearted. ... I have to think he's a great role model."

Amanda Martin, a former supervising prosecutor who has spent nearly a decade arguing before Redd, called him "no-nonsense. He yells at you when you need yelling at, and he gives sympathy when it's deserved."

On a recent morning, Redd dished out opinions with an unpredictable mix of gruffness and courtesy to those charged with drunken driving, vandalism, stalking, and other crimes.

When one defendant showed up late and claimed he had been lost, Redd looked at him incredulously. "Are you aware we start at 9 a.m.?" he asked. Then he ordered him to buy a GPS system. "I don't want you to get lost again," he said. "If you violate probation, I will give you the maximum sentence. Do you understand me?"

When a man pleaded guilty to threatening to cut a woman's throat, he ruled that he could remain out of jail if he kept clear of the woman. "You see her walk on the other side of the street, you run the other way," he said.

To ensure that a Wentworth student understood the consequences of his actions after being suspended from school for using a video camera to record fellow students having sex, Redd reminded him that his family had forfeited at least $30,000 for the academic year.

"You understand that two uninvolved individuals were irreparably affected?" he asked, peering at the defendant. "Did you learn something from this innocent prank? Not so innocent, huh? This is probably going to affect you the rest of your life."

Redd then ordered him to write a letter of apology to the two students. "I don't want your letter to explain away your actions, OK?" he said. "I want it to show some reflection."

And after he told Elisha McKoy how to dress the next time he comes to court, the young man's mother said she appreciated Redd's lecture.

Juanita McKoy of Dorchester said she had been to the courthouse too many times with Elisha and her other sons.

"He talks to them like he's the father that they never had," she said. "I just wish they would take his advice more often."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.

Earthquake survivor is pressured to return home

Zilania Joacin, who suffers from dementia, said she would die alone if she returned to Haiti after care in Cambridge.

CAMBRIDGE — They help her into a sequined dress, tie a good luck balloon to her bed, and share a cake bidding “Bon Voyage.”

The medical staff at Spaulding Hospital Cambridge has healed the wounds of Zilania Joacin, fed and clothed her, helped her in and out of bed nearly every day since she arrived with little more than a hospital johnny.

Now, some in tears, they gather in the cramped room the wizened woman shares with another patient. They have come to say goodbye.

Joacin arrived in Boston four years ago, battered by the earthquake that ravaged Haiti in 2010. For nearly all that time, home has been the second floor of the rehabilitation hospital. The 71-year-old has been here longer than any other patient, and, by all accounts, she is the last evacuee of the quake remaining in a Boston-area hospital.

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The doctors and nurses have done their best to salve the pain of a broken hip and several strokes. Joacin is stable now and although she needs round-the-clock care, it can be provided by a home health aide or at a residential facility. Administrators say it no longer makes sense for her to remain in a high-demand bed that costs about $1,000 a day, an expense absorbed by Spaulding.

It’s time for her to go, they insist, especially now that a hospital in Haiti is ready to provide her free care. She has no way to pay for the steep cost of care in the United States, no access to government health plans or private insurance, no well-off relatives.

Three days before Joacin is scheduled to leave, the staff has come together during a shift change. They shower her with hugs, pictures, and presents: toiletries and medication, shoes and clothing, and two new suitcases, necessities that may not be easy to come by back home.

Joacin, illiterate and suffering from dementia, does not understand the purpose of the party, she says later.

Neither she nor her relatives — who deeply appreciate the top-flight care she has received — are ready for her to leave, especially to go back to Haiti.

“If I go there, I’m going to die,” she says a few days after the party, seated in her wheelchair. “I’ll die alone.”

Her husband of 50 years, Reserve Coffy, who has been taken in by a Haitian family in Cambridge and spends several hours each day visiting his wife, wants her to stay at Spaulding as long as she can. He fears what will become of their lives if they return home.

Jean Paul Coffy was living in Chicago with his wife and two children when he learned about the earthquake. He tried frantically to reach his parents and other relatives, but there was no getting through.

So the musician pulled together $1,500 from his savings and a donation from a friend, gathered water purification tablets and cereal bars, and flew to Haiti.

There, he grasped a candle as he made his way into the remains of his family’s concrete-and-tin home in Port-au-Prince.

It was six days after the catastrophe, which left 100,000 to 300,000 people dead. Major aftershocks still rattled the country.

He found his parents huddled in an intact back room, surviving on nothing more than crackers. His mother, a diabetic who had previously undergone a hip operation, had a broken leg, which had turned dangerously swollen and infected. His father had minor injuries. A brother and a sister were dead. Another brother had disappeared.

His mother needed help, desperately.

The son hired jitneys, buses, and taxis to take his parents on perilous journeys over rutted roads. First, they went to the Dominican Republic, and then back to Haiti. Over two months, he spent thousands of dollars on medical care, government documents, housing, food. He started a blog and raised thousands of dollars.

Their odyssey ultimately took them to a hospital in Cange, Haiti, run by Partners In Health, a Boston-based charity that provides free health services to impoverished people around the world. Doctors there assessed Joacin’s condition and determined she was unlikely to survive if she did not get to a hospital in the United States.

That was when her luck changed. At the same time Joacin was in Cange, so were some of the most powerful people from Boston’s medical firmament: Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Dr. Gary Gottlieb, president of Partners HealthCare, which owns Brigham and Women’s and Spaulding.

They promised to provide Joacin free care in Massachusetts.

Within a few days, she became one of fewer than 100 earthquake victims flown to the United States with the help of Partners In Health, which arranged for her medical visa, a helicopter ride from the hospital to the airport in Port-au-Prince, and a special medical evacuation plane to Boston.

When the couple arrived at the Brigham in late March 2010, Joacin underwent a battery of care that included an expensive hip replacement. Within a month, medical officials transferred her to Spaulding in Cambridge.

“This has been the hardest experience of my life,” Jean Paul Coffy told a physician who accompanied the family to Boston, according to a Partners In Health blog that the charity uses to raise money. “But now I feel like I won the lottery.”

* * * * *

After several months, Joacin’s infection heals, and her other ailments are brought under control. The staff at Spaulding begins searching for discharge options, maintaining that Joacin no longer belongs in a hospital.

It is costing the hospital a lot of money to provide her care. By the beginning of this year, administrators say, they have spent nearly $2 million on her treatment.

“The question is where our responsibility ends,” says Joanne Fucile, vice president of operations and director of nursing for Spaulding Hospital Cambridge, who notes the average length of stay for a patient is less than a month. “I don’t know the answer to that.”

SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF

Zilania Joacin was interviewed with her husband, Reserve Coffy, at Spaulding Hospital Cambridge. Her time as a patient there has been unusually long.

It is a question Joacin’s son has wrestled with for years. “This is the first time in my life I’m begging someone for help, and it’s humiliating,” he says, in a telephone interview from Chicago.

Joacin does not qualify for Medicaid because she is not a citizen or a legal resident. She remains here on a humanitarian basis, a status that must be renewed every year.

Spaulding staff members, as well as Joacin’s family, check to see if an institution closer to her son in Chicago might provide free care. There is none. When family members consider seeking US residency for Joacin, they are advised by Partners In Health not to try, saying Joacin might first have to return to Haiti to be eligible.

Options narrowing, Spaulding proposes buying medical equipment for the family and flying Joacin to Chicago. Her son says he wishes he could care for his mother, but she cannot stand on her own and needs help 24 hours a day.

Jean Paul Coffy and his wife run a day-care center out of their home, which is not designed for someone in a wheelchair. Their combined income, they say, is less than $40,000 a year, not nearly enough to pay for the aide and the changes to their home that Joacin’s care requires.

“We really don’t have the resources,” the son says. “I wish I could just put her on my back and take her home. I should be able to do that as a man. I’m shameful that I can’t.”

In recent months, Spaulding administrators begin pushing more aggressively for Joacin to leave the hospital. “Patient and family informed that we would be looking for resolution by the end of September,” says an entry from last September on a timeline of Joacin’s care, which hospital officials provide to the Globe.

In another entry, hospital staff say: “One concern is that the visas are due for renewal in May, and given the improvement in infrastructure in Haiti and the patient’s clinical stability, there is no medical reason to renew the visa.”

So hospital officials begin working with Partners In Health to have the charity care for her at its hospital in Cange, in a remote village in Haiti’s Central Plateau.

Officials at Partners In Health say they receive consent from Joacin, her husband, and their son to fly the woman to Haiti and care for her there.

Spaulding offers a wheelchair and at least five days of medication and syringes; their staff offers to donate other necessities. Partners In Health finds a physician to fly with Joacin on an early flight Jan. 20. They take care of paperwork, clear her departure with customs officials, and arrange for her to be received in Cange.

“I spoke with the son, the patient, and husband, and they all seemed comfortable with the idea,” Dr. Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of Partners In Health, says afterward. “We talked in detail about what kind of care we could provide in Haiti.”

* * * * *

Advocates for Haitian immigrants say they had no idea an earthquake victim has remained at a local hospital for so long.

Most earthquake survivors requiring long-term care were absorbed by friends and family, while others, who completed their treatment, have returned to a country that remains far from healed.

“Haiti is not in any condition to receive anyone,” says Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami Inc./Haitian Women of Miami.

After the earthquake, the Department of Homeland Security granted temporary protected status to tens of thousands of Haitians who were already in the United States, allowing them to live and work in the country.

But Joacin is in the country on a humanitarian basis, a provision granted on a case-by-case basis.

“It’s rare as far as immigration goes,” says Daniel Cosgrove, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, noting humanitarian parole applies to those facing life-threatening concerns and lasts until those concerns are resolved.

Everyone — immigration advocates, the woman’s family, hospital officials — call Joacin’s situation vexing, because her immigration status makes her ineligible for public services here in the United States.

In the cold of January, just days before Joacin’s flight is scheduled to leave, her husband, son, and daughter-in-law are panicking.

They’re in an awkward position. They do not want to appear churlish or ungrateful after all that Spaulding and Partners In Health have done. But they insist that sending Joacin back to Haiti amounts to a death sentence, and they are concerned their protests have fallen on deaf ears.

When Jean Paul Coffy speaks by phone with Mukherjee, the Partners In Health medical chief, six days before the scheduled flight, he believes the doctor is informing him that Joacin’s return to Haiti is a fait accompli.

“When she notified me that she was going to Haiti, she said they could have put her in the street, because they don’t want to keep her anymore,” Coffy says. “She said they don’t have another option, other than to send her back.”

He and his wife are also concerned that Spaulding and Partners In Health seem to have based the plan on consent from his mother, who has varying degrees of lucidity, and his father, who is also illiterate.

“There is absolutely no way that my mother could have the cognitive ability to make that decision,” he says. “If you ask her, she didn’t even know she was going.”

Three days before the flight to Haiti, around the time officials at Spaulding are hosting the farewell party, Coffy and his wife send an e-mail to Ophelia Dahl, executive director of Partners In Health, reiterating their opposition.

“We have made it perfectly clear that we so not want Zilania Joacin to return to Haiti,” they write.

Around the same time, a Globe reporter calls Partners In Health to ask about Joacin’s impending departure. Jennifer Brown, a spokeswoman for the charity, calls back later in the afternoon and says Joacin’s departure has been canceled.

“We don’t have consent [for her] to be released,” Brown says. “We can’t take someone who doesn’t want to go. No plane ticket, no Cange, no Haiti.”

* * * * *

When the staff at Spaulding learns that Joacin is not leaving, many are confused.

“We had the feeling that she understood,” says Susan Moore, director of case management for Spaulding Network.

She adds: “I felt badly for the staff, because they put their heart and soul into a proper goodbye, and now it’s fallen apart.”

Her colleague, Joanne Fucile, says their plan was a reasonable solution to a troubling problem.

“We thought this was a good, safe discharge,” she says. “To have this canceled at the last minute by the family was kind of disheartening, to say the least.”

The Coffys learn of the news from the Globe. They never hear back from anyone at Partners in Health or Spaulding.

In an interview at the hospital a few days after the plan is abandoned, Joacin appears confused as well. She says she was not aware that she was about to be sent back to Haiti and prefers to remain at the hospital, where she spends most of her time sitting in her wheelchair in silence, watching the commotion of nurses and doctors making their rounds. She is lost in the past and the increasing murk of her mind.

“I don’t have a house. I don’t have family there. I don’t have a place to go,” she says, her granddaughter translating.

She strains to understand the questions and nods off sporadically. Joacin, her nails painted the colors of the Haitian flag, says she passes her days watching television and thinking back to life before the earthquake, before so many friends and relatives died, when she sold cooked meals and sundries from her home.

“I think about how different I was before all this,” she says.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t the same person as I was. I’m just sorry for the overall situation.”

But Cambridge is where she wants to remain. “This is where I am. This is where I am with God.”

* * * * *

So now Zilania Joacin has nowhere to go. She remains on the second-floor of the rehabilitation hospital, visited daily by her husband, who is still living in Cambridge, and on occasion by other relatives.

Officials at Partners In Health and Spaulding are at a loss about what to do.

“I have no idea; I really don’t know,” says Mukherjee, noting that Joacin is not a patient of theirs and not their responsibility.

Spaulding officials say they will continue writing off their mounting losses for Joacin’s care and have no plans to kick her out.

They are considering the possibilities, such as moving her to one of their residential facilities, which would cost less. But that is fraught with its own problems.

“Those beds are even scarcer than where she is,” Moore says. “It would be cheaper, but for the overall system, it would be a greater burden for our patients.”

So now, she says, they are back where they started, with Joacin’s fate in limbo.